Recurrent Relational Networks

By Rasmus Berg Palm, Ulrich Paquet, Ole Winther. 2017

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is concerned with learning to solve tasks that require a chain of interdependent steps of relational inference, like answering complex questions about the relationships between objects, or solving puzzles where the smaller elements of a solution mutually constrain each other. We introduce the recurrent relational network, a general purpose module that operates on a graph representation of objects. As a generalization of Santoro et al. [2017]'s relational network, it can augment any neural network model with the capacity to do many-step relational reasoning. We achieve state of the art results on the bAbI textual question-answering dataset with the recurrent relational network, consistently solving 20/20 tasks. As bAbI is not particularly challenging from a relational reasoning point of view, we introduce Pretty-CLEVR, a new diagnostic dataset for relational reasoning. In the Pretty-CLEVR set-up, we can vary the question to control for the number of relational reasoning steps that are required to obtain the answer. Using Pretty-CLEVR, we probe the limitations of multi-layer perceptrons, relational and recurrent relational networks. Finally, we show how recurrent relational networks can learn to solve Sudoku puzzles from supervised training data, a challenging task requiring upwards of 64 steps of relational reasoning. We achieve state-of-the-art results amongst comparable methods by solving 96.6% of the hardest Sudoku puzzles.

Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Model Architectures, Graph Learning

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In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

  1. Luc Van Gool
  2. Jie Zhou
  3. Dacheng Tao
  4. Xiaogang Wang
  5. Ming-Hsuan Yang
  6. Trevor Darrell
  7. Alan L. Yuille
  8. Andrew Zisserman

In Model Architectures

  1. Klaus Greff
  2. Sjoerd van Steenkiste
  3. J. Urgen Schmidhuber
  4. Xiang Ren
  5. Maosong Sun
  6. Zhiyuan Liu
  7. Jie Zhou
  8. Felix Stahlberg

In Graph Learning

  1. Maosong Sun
  2. Zhiyuan Liu
  3. Petar Velickovic
  4. Cheng Yang
  5. Meng Qu
  6. Pedro A. Szekely
  7. Xiang Ren
  8. Andrea Lodi

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